David Walker's Appeal and Everyday Abolition

63 Pages·2016·5.06 MB·English

University of Colorado, Boulder
CU Scholar
English Graduate Theses & Dissertations English
Spring 1-1-2011
David Walker’s Appeal and Everyday Abolition
Benjamin Shearer Beck
University of Colorado at Boulder, [email protected]
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Beck, Benjamin Shearer, "David Walker’s Appeal and Everyday Abolition" (2011).English Graduate Theses & Dissertations. 17.
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David Walker’s Appeal and Everyday Abolition

by

Ben Beck

B.A., University of Vermont, 2007

A thesis submitted to the
Faculty of the Graduate School of the
University of Colorado in partial fulfillment
of the requirement for the degree of
Master of Arts
Department of English
This thesis entitled:
David Walker’s Appeal and Everyday Abolition
written by Ben Beck
has been approved for the Department of English

__________________________________________
Jordan Alexander Stein, Thesis Chair

_________________________________________
Paul Youngquist, Graduate Chair

________________________________________
Nan Goodman, Reader

________________________________________
Teresa Toulouse, Reader

Date ________________

The final copy of this thesis has been examined by the signatories, and we
find that both the content and the form meet acceptable presentation standards
of scholarly work in the above mentioned discipline.
Beck i i i
ABSTRACT

Beck, Ben (M.A, English)
David Walker’s Appeal and Everyday Abolition
Thesis directed by Assistant Professor Jordan Alexander Stein

Titled “David Walker’s Appeal and Everyday Abolition” this thesis uses book
history methodologies to reconstruct the pamphlet’s overlooked uses. Where many
scholars highlight radical and revolutionary tendencies, I explore archival evidence that
seems unassimilable to these critical positions. Instead, this thesis mobilizes marginalia,
gift exchanges, archival acquisitions, and printing records to paint a different reception
history of Walker’s Appeal. I suggest that this evidence points toward a non-sensational,
ordinary side of Walker’s pamphlet. By considering the variegated “situatedness” of
Walker’s Appeal, the thesis probes a larger idea of “everyday abolition.” This capacious
term gathers ordinary, minor, and non-sensational abolitionist practices. “David Walker’s
Appeal and Everyday Abolition” argues that ordinary practices—gifting, preservation,
private reading—constitute an understudied, undertheorized, and politically significant
elements of antebellum literary history.
Beck i v

CONTENTS

List of Illustrations.………………………………………………………………v

1. Introduction………………………………………………………………………1

2. The Walker Effect; or, the Disappearance of Everyday Abolition………………3

3. Everyday Abolition at the Margins………………………………………………6

4. Everyday Abolition as Mementos……………………………………………......21

5. Everyday Abolition and Printing………………………………………………...30

6. The Futures of Everyday Abolition……………………………………………...42

Notes………………………………………………………………………….......46

Bibliography………………………………………………………………….......52
Beck v

ILLUSTRATIONS

Figure 2.1. David Walker, Appeal, 3rd edition (Boston: 1830). Courtesy of the Houghton
Library, Harvard University………………………………………………………...……..3

Figure 3.1. David Walker, Appeal, 3rd edition (Boston: 1830). Courtesy of the Houghton
Library, Harvard University……………………………………………………………….9

Figure 3.2. David Walker, Appeal, 3rd edition (Boston: 1830). Courtesy of the Houghton
Library, Harvard University……………………………………………………………...11

Figure 3.3. David Walker, Appeal, 3rd edition (Boston: 1830). Courtesy of the Houghton
Library, Harvard University……………………………………………………………...13

Figure 3.4. David Walker, Appeal, 3rd edition (Boston: 1830). Courtesy of the Houghton
Library, Harvard University……………………………………………………………...18

Figure 4.1. David Walker, Appeal, 3rd edition (Boston: 1830). Courtesy of Kroch Library,
Cornell University……………………………………………………..…………………23

Figure 4.2. David Walker, Appeal, 3rd edition (Boston: 1830). Courtesy of Kroch Library,
Cornell University………………………………………………………………………..23

Figure 4.3. David Walker, Appeal, 1st edition (Boston: 1829). Courtesy of the Houghton
Library, Harvard University……………………………………………………………...26

Figure 5.1. David Walker, Appeal, 3rd edition (Boston: 1830). Courtesy of The Sheridan
Libraries, Johns Hopkins University..................................................................................34

Figure 5.2. David Walker, Appeal, 3rd edition (Boston: 1830). Courtesy of The Sheridan
Libraries, Johns Hopkins University……………………………………………………..34

Figure 5.3. David Walker, Appeal, 3rd edition (Boston: 1830). Courtesy, American
Antiquarian Society……………………………………………………………..……….34

Figure 5.4. David Walker, Appeal, 3rd edition (Boston: 1830). Courtesy, American
Antiquarian Society…………………………………………………………..………….34

Figure 5.5. David Walker, Appeal, 2nd edition (Boston: 1830). Courtesy, Massachusetts
Historical Society………………………………………………………………………..37

Figure 5.6. David Walker, Appeal, 3rd edition (Boston: 1830). Courtesy of The Sheridan
Libraries, Johns Hopkins University…………………………………………………….37
Beck v i

Figure 5.7. David Walker, Appeal, 1st edition (Boston: 1829). Courtesy, Boston Public
Library………………………………………………………………………………….38

Figure 5.8. David Walker, Appeal, 3rd edition (Boston: 1830). Courtesy of The Sheridan
Libraries, Johns Hopkins University…………………………………………………...38
Beck 1
1. Introduction

Not every abolitionist burned copies of the U.S. Constitution, raided ammunition
depots in Harper’s Ferry, or attended public protests. But scholarship as well as the
public imagination privileges these major, sensational registries of antislavery sentiment
in the antebellum United States. Consequently, the historiography of abolition tethers
itself almost exclusively to events and revolutions, actions typically associated with
“politics.” This macroscopic perspective jettisons the minor registries of antislavery
sentiment into the indiscernible background of wars, rebellions, and conventions.
David Walker’s Appeal to the Coloured Citizens of the World offers a compelling
test case to explore the chasm between sensational abolition and its opposite form, what I
call “everyday abolition.” Briefly, everyday abolition is a term that encapsulates minor,
overlooked practices of antislavery sentiment. Since its publication in 1829 readers
excerpt, editors anthologize, and scholars analyze the pamphlet in such a singular way
that the Appeal becomes overwhelmingly sensational and revolutionary. Ironically, this
reading-history microscope blurs the larger historical spheres in which the pamphlet
circulated. At this extreme, Walker’s Appeal becomes inescapably radical. But not
everyone who read the Appeal became a militant abolitionist. Some annotated, some
gifted, some printed.
These unheralded actions constitute the “everyday” reception-history of Walker’s
Appeal. Book history brings these overlooked actions back into the picture. By
nominating these marginalized, overlooked actions as critical processes, the sphere of
abolition politics widens. In turn, the historiography of abolition widens as well. Book
history invokes the microscopic registers of Walker’s Appeal—its marginalia, its
Beck 2
signatures and inscriptions, its gesturing manicules—in order to emphasize their
importance for reconstructing a richer, fuller story of American abolition.
This essay asks how book history methodologies clarify the relationship between
Walker’s Appeal and everyday abolition. First, I examine the historiographical processes
responsible for the disappearance of non-sensational readings of the pamphlet: periodical
coverage, excerpting, and anthologizing make up the processes of the “Walker Effect.”
Next, marginalia lays the groundwork for replacing the out-of-focus Walker Effect with
an intensely focused example of how a Bostonian read the pamphlet. This reading history
is the first manifestation of alternative, non-sensational, non-revolutionary uses of
Walker’s Appeal. Alternative uses of the pamphlet appear in its status as a memento, the
third category. Various abolitionists and American politicians exchanged the Appeal as
sentimental tokens and donated it to university collections. The gift exchange between
givers’ hands anticipates the forgotten role that the pamphlet’s printers played in
producing the Appeal. I suggest that in the small printing shop of Hooton and Teprell,
abolition as a concept remained ancillary to job printing needs. I challenge the romance
of the author by demonstrating that the pamphlet’s famous typography bears indelible
traces of the printers as well as marks of its author. Finally, this project asks how these
variegated locations and practices constellate as “everyday abolition.” Because
sensational histories of abolition restrict the field of political practices to major events
and actors, this project also asks how abolition appears differently when everyday
abolition widens political practices.
Beck 3
2. The Walker Effect: or, the Disappearance of Everyday Abolition
What accounts for the disappearance of the Appeal’s ordinary history? Since its
publication in 1829, Walker’s pamphlet has been subject to something I call the “Walker
Effect.” This term refers to an organizational and narratological trope that privileges the
sensationally violent rhetoric of Walker’s
Appeal and neglects the pamphlet’s much
Fig. 2.1
more common passages. In turn, history has
reduced Walker’s Appeal to one repeated
phrase: “an incendiary pamphlet.” Even FW Holland, whose marginalia undergirds the
existence of this paper, inscribed this phrase on its cover page: “a celebrated incendiary
Pamphlet / much complained of at South! // written entirely by a Negro—” (fig. 1).
Literary history routinely equates Walker’s Appeal with the Walker Effect, literally in the
case of Holland’s note.
Ironically, one of the ways that the Walker Effect gained traction is through the
pamphlet’s saturation of antebellum American print culture. Newspapers and periodicals
printed reviews and editorials about the pamphlet, and they all largely condemned its
incendiary rhetoric. Pithy phrases, “kill or be killed,” and longer passages, “O
Americans! Americans!!...your DESTRUCTION is at hand, and will be speedily
consummated unless you REPENT,”1 stuck in the minds of readers and reviewers alike.
Benjamin Lundy’s review in his newspaper “Genius of Universal Emancipation”
encapsulates mid-nineteenth-century assessments. Of Walker, Lundy says that he
“indulges himself in the wildest strain of reckless fanaticism.” This “inflammatory
publication…is a labored attempt to rouse the worst passions of human nature, and